Andrea Low

Andrea Low is Project Curator Pacific at Tāmaki Paenga Hira (Auckland Museum) in Aotearoa. Tongareva, Hawai‘i, Fanning Island, Fiji, and Samoa, are the places that Andrea traces her heritage while also a descendant of colonisers. During her time at MOKU, Andrea had time and space to continue her work on narrative and storytelling in museum contexts as well as researching co-curation in partnership with Indigenous source communities.

Taken in 1905, this image of my ‘aiga at Papase’ea in Upolu, Samoa is a measina reminding me of our stories, our community, our survival and endurance. My grandmother Tuavivi and her siblings are young children and their faces contrast with that of the man standing half way down the sliding rocks: Faumuina Mataʻafa who was one of the leaders of the pacifist Mau independence movement whose motto was Samoa mo Samoa : Samoa for Samoans. Just over 20 years later the resistance movement suffered at the hands of the New Zealand administration on Black Saturday. This is just one of the stories that unravels out of a single image. As Patrick Chamoiseau says, there are a thousand more.